It does convey that message, but it's a bit over the top to say that's the only way to convey the message. You could, for instance, have them walk around on leashes with collars around their necks.

The Logain’s army battle scene really stuck out as badly done. It feels like low budget, amateur work done for a highschool film project. Everything from the lighting to the choreography to the special effects feels cheap and shoddy.

But as I said before, they’ve already changed so much that nothing is likely to happen like it did in the book. No reason to expect them to bend over backwards to make Mat in particular hit his book notes.

In general, I've stopped starting fiction (either watching or reading) unless I know that the ending has already been written and isn't widely panned. It does mean that I'm not current with new things, but I figure I'm doing my small part to protest against what I see as rather widespread proliferation of premises and world building being allowed to substitute for actual payoff and resolution in fiction writing. It's worse in TV writing, but written fiction is guilty as well.

The very concepts of good and evil are assumed. There are various proofs that could be offered to show that free will (with the implied ability to choose evil) is an intrinsic good. However, they all obviously rely on a definition of good and evil that must be assumed. How do you define intrinsic good and evil?

I've heard that. My point is that it no longer makes sense. Order matters. For Rand to now learn to sword fight is like deciding to perfect crawling when he has already proven he is the faster runner in the world.

The scene is fun. The problem I have is that it effectively means that sword Rand never happens. Obviously, you can still have him learn the sword. But a big part of Rand learning the sword was that he couldn't count on using the one power and needed to defend himself. It's humanizing. But if he can mass power word kill way more people than he could ever hope to fight with a sword, there just isn't a good justification for learning to use a sword. Thus, in the show Rand is always the fraud carrying the blademaster's sword and never the blademaster.

Because free will is an inherent good and overriding free will is therefore at least somewhat evil. A person who is forced to do good things is not himself evil, but neither is he good. His capacity to choose good has been destroyed. Do you think that slavery is good if the slaveowner only makes his slaves do good things? What if he frees his slaves and one of them becomes a criminal that causes suffering? Is his decision to free them now an evil decision? Also, I would add that suffering is not an inherent evil. It can be the result of evil, but it can also exist for other reasons. Reducing suffering is good, but when other evil is committed to reduce suffering, that action may not be good. Every person on the earth will suffer at some point in the future. If reducing suffering was an inherent good, murdering people might be justified for the simple reason that killing them will prevent their future suffering. Of course, their death might cause others to suffer additionally, but it might not. And in the hypothetical, the additional sufferers could also be killed. Balefiring an entire city would likely reduce a great deal of suffering without so many loose ends to suffer so long as whole families are taken together. To be clear, I realize that these aren't easy questions and that the answers are also not black and white. That's why it's interesting for a series of thousands of pages to explore these issues. But to say that it makes no sense for free will to be recognized for its inherent value and good is an oversimplification that deserves pushback and exploration.

Almost like the complaints aren’t just about the show ruining gender dynamics. It’s also the fact that the replacement story isn’t very good.

At this point, I don't expect the show to go much beyond season 3. But if it does, I also don't think we can reasonably expect the plot to even hit major points from the book in a recognizable way. At best, we'll get individual scenes that look like certain scenes from the book, but there is essentially no chance that the way these scenes are connected and fit together will resemble the book. That is already what happened in season 2 more often than not, and it will only continue to compound. Worrying about how Galad will make peace with Perrin is completely irrelevant.

What are the apostrophes in the old tongue supposed to mean? Are they guttural stops, pauses, omitted vowel sounds (if so, which ones), or something else? Are they just added to make it look fantasy? How do you pronounce them when reading? Personally, I just read the words as if the apostrophe weren't there and assume that they are sort of added for "flavor." But I'm not sure that is the intention. Thoughts?